I truly believe that there are consequences for everything that happens on this planet. When we are armed with knowledge, and we choose to ignore what we know inside is true, we get hurt, and before you @ me, I’ve ignored my instincts enough to know when my instincts are always right and I am often not so much.
I know that I am ready for my future, and I really don’t give a flying flip if my future is ready for me, but that’s entirely the problem.
Do you know why people keep seeing and saying that shit? Because it’s annoyingly true. Literally every wives tale, every folk song, it’s all true, and that’s the pisser because we KNOW it’s true, that’s not what pisses us off.
It’s not knowing that you got raped/beaten/tortured/jailed against your will even though you were and continue to be an INNOCENT.
It’s the fact that everyone around you swears up and down that even if you ARE innocent, it’s still your fault because you should have known better. Right?!
But what if knowing better doesn’t mean shit either?
EVERYTHING on THIS planet happens for a reason, YOU don’t have to like the reason, YOU don’t have to give a fuck about the reason, BUT THE REASON IS OFTEN NOT ABOUT YOU, so suck it the fuck up. That’s rule 69 about being human.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I walked into a strip club to sit down and have a few drinks with a bunch of random strangers with like me, nothing better to do with their weekends.
I had no idea I was surrounded by Hell’s Angels, and Red Scorpions or Wolf Pack members or anyone else, and if you’re in BC you know those names and so you know me using them here, matters.
What I did know was that I wanted to get drink and party, I wanted to throw my nights away and work my days off, and I wanted to have fun and be young and beautiful, but that’s not what I got.
I got caught in the crossfire between three groups of people, and 1 fucking evil awful person, who decided that he wanted what wasn’t offered to him freely, who thought using ME would get him what he wanted.
It was because of him and the memories I have with him that I know why I went through what I went through and how I survived, and now that I do, you bet your damned ass I’m ready to see a brighter and happier future. I am ready to have fancy cars and dinner dates with whoever the fuck I want to, and I’m ready to find a group of people I enjoy hanging out with, but more than that?
I want my friggin family back!
I used to think that every single person I loved in my past knew what was up, and knew what was going on and that I was the only one who didn’t, but the bitch about recovering memories is that you start to see things differently, and you start to understand that what you THOUGHT you were seeing, wasn’t the reality and when you flip the fucking switch you see things a lot differently. That doesn’t make this new clarity more…honest, it just means that it exists.
The people that I love, the people I partied with, laughed with, sang, and danced with, are the people I want back in my life. The ones who like me, in a variety of horrible and scary ways, faced life or death because OTHER people thought that ripping OUR friend group apart would make THEIR lives better. How’d that work out for you?
I have so many friends that we used to call ourselves Surrey Crew, a group of kids with sorrows and perceived short comings that brought us together and excluded us from a world that thought we weren’t good enough as we were. We drifted apart after the violence, after the trauma, but that doesn’t mean that I love them any less.
Some of us died, like actually died, or were murdered, some of us had to go into hiding, and legit this shit happened in Canada, so no, life in Canada isn’t easier than America. There are dozens of stories that I could tell that would create entire franchises based on the lives of my friends, but here’s the important part:
SO COULD YOU.
Each of us has stories of danger, fear, excitement, and love, and looking back at the past helps us understand how to tell our stories, but looking to the future is all about celebrating our pasts, celebrating that we survived and that we’re still here telling the stories.
Everyone in my past who knows me knows I am a storyteller, I have always been, I was destined to be because I was so often (in my early twenties) the quiet one, and then the weird one, and then the quiet one again.
As we’re moving into 2022, I am feeling myself drifting further and further from my past, but not from the people who were a part of making me who I am, if anything I feel like one day I will get to sit down with them, have a beer, and just blow some smoke at the fact that we fucking survived.
Starting this blog was completely about survival, but I really very much want it to be about the story that comes after the acknowledgment.
First, you survive.
Then you acknowledge that you’ve survived.
Then you get to start thriving as you pick through the pieces and rebuild. I can’t remember wh said that.
I look forward to the day that I get to look my brothers and cousins in the face and stick out my tongue and say “I fucking told you stupids,” because I am still convinced that I am the world’s smartest 7 year old in the history of any time or any dimension.
I am proud of how far I have come and I am looking forward to seeing my family in the future when we can celebrate all of the things they survived that I don’t even know about, or haven’t considered they might have had to survive, and I am sure there’s a lot of that.
The outlook is positive and THAT’S the part that scares me, because it’s always when you least expect it that they never see you coming, which means that something bad is probably going to happen at some point, but whatever it is I’ll survive that too. I’m too strong not to.
That’s another rule about being human. God’s can’t do more than you can handle, and I can handle anything. (Read that last paragraph as many times as it takes to sink in.)
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 